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Chapter 1: What themes are explored in Michael Christie's Greenwood?
This is an ABC podcast.
Islands in fiction, trees, Napoleon and the end of the Raj in literature seen through a haze of opium smoke. Hi, welcome to the Bookshelf on Radio National. I'm Kate Evans.
It is a bit cloudy in here, Kate. But I'm Cassie McCullough, here with some new books, climate fiction and some historical beekeeping, Kate.
And British crime novelist Abir Mukherjee will be along later. His novels are set in India in the 1920s and he'll talk about the bookshelf that shaped him. Do I still have to call it me, my shelf and I this year, Cassie?
Look, you can take people to brilliant puns, but if they won't drink, what can you do? Sorry. I don't know. I'm still calling it that. You can call it what you want.
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Chapter 2: How does Tyson Yunkaporta define Sand Talk?
Also today, a Canadian novel that begins in a tree museum because by 2038, that's the only place you can see them. Hello, Joni Mitchell.
Oh, do I have to play Joni Mitchell?
All the trees, put them in a tree museum And they charge the people a dollar and a half just to
But first, let's welcome to the bookshelf today Tyson Yunkaporta. He's a senior lecturer in Indigenous knowledges at Deakin University and his latest book is Sand Talk, How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. Well, how timely. Tyson, hello. Hey, how you doing?
So, Tyson, what does Sand Talk mean?
The term Sand Talk is just a modality of conveying information. It can also be ritualistic, artistic, etc. But a lot of it's just everyday stuff you do. You just draw on the dirt to show people places, things, abstract ideas even. Basically a way of teaching and conveying knowledge.
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Chapter 3: What insights does Tyson share about Indigenous thinking?
So it comes from a sort of the visual image of bending down, drawing a picture in the sand.
Yeah, even sitting in a circle and, you know, the old ladies there will be drawing, you know, showing different things in different places, different stories, you know, big ideas. You know, like 10,000 words would take too long to say, so you show an image.
Yeah.
And it comes through a lot more viscerally and it's super irrational and conveys a lot of knowledge in a very short space of time.
Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it, how just some gestural stuff can really take you along. So that's such a long way conceptually. Now, just a few weeks ago, Tyson, Ilka Tamke was on the show and she recommended this book of yours to us. And she described it as a Indigenous cosmology. Now, what do you reckon? Is that a good summation? Does that work for you, that title?
Well, Ilka's pretty amazing. So she does the feminist fantasy stuff. Yes. Celtic kind of.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of trees in Greenwood?
The song was her most recent one.
That's it? Yeah. And then there was a sequel. She described it as a cosmology.
Yes.
Right. I mean, every book is a peek into somebody's cosmology. You know, it's like a fish swimming in water, doesn't know what water is. It's the same way you look at someone else's cosmology and you go, oh, wow, they got a cosmology. But, you know, everybody got a cosmology. It's just, you know, what the cosmos looks like from your point of view.
So what did you want to do with this book, Tyson? Because one of the things I thought was really interesting was the way that you say to us in the early parts of this book that this isn't about you wanting to tell your life story. You don't want to do one of those narratives about exactly what's happened to you and use that as a way to explain Indigenous thinking.
You're wanting to do something else. So why was it important to put that out there, that it's not just about telling personal stories?
Well, because that's what everybody demands, because that's what they're used to reading. There's a professor, Martin Nakata, he's a Torres Strait Islander, really big intellectual. And he mentored me for a few years. And I was doing a lot of personal narrative, like we all do. And he said, you've got to stop doing that. He said, that's what we all do.
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Chapter 5: How does the concept of the Great Withering impact the story?
You need to go beyond that narrative. You need to get to the meta-narrative.
Mm-hmm.
But it's also, I don't know, I started to get, I don't know, annoyed about it because when I stopped doing that, people were disappointed. You know, it's like, no, I want that. I want to hear, yeah, I want to hear your terrible story because that's what they're used to hearing.
Well, you put that right up the front. You say my life story is not redemptive or inspiring and I don't like sharing it. And that's something that often happens with women writers as well. It's presumed that everything is about the biography and the personal and that you're not allowed to go big picture.
That's it.
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Chapter 6: What role does the character Jake play in the narrative?
It's all these old white dudes. What do they call them? Pale, stale, and male or something. They never have to do that. They just get to, because it's considered that their voice is neutral or something. So they just get to go out and be the canon. Everybody else has to justify everything with their story. It's like, oh, you're a woman. I need to hear about all that.
Yeah, instead of just being able to write what you want to write.
And so in this book of yours, this isn't just about Australian Aboriginal perspectives, is it? I mean, you've travelled around the world. What happened when you met a bunch of Sami people?
LAUGHTER
So they're from, you know, the North Pole pretty much, you know, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark and parts of Russia and then right up.
Yeah, they're riding a reindeer, aren't they?
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Chapter 7: How does the author connect personal histories with environmental themes?
Yeah, yeah. So they've got that big totemic connection to reindeer. And so, you know, I guess you go to these sort of international events with international Indigenous people, you know, all around the world. And then there's these people who they, you know, they've got yellow hair, blonde hair, like rosy cheeks, you know, blue eyes, all that sort of thing.
And, you know, in the same room with Maoris and you know, Apaches and all kinds of things. And, um, you can see everybody doing a double take. What are they doing here? But then they start talking and it's like, oh, that's just like talking to Artie or something. It made me start thinking a lot about, um, color and, and all this sort of thing.
And a lot of the preconceived ideas and attachments we have to, to the, you know, the image of what an indigenous person is and these kinds of racialized ideas of whiteness.
Well, Sand Talk, How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World is what it's called. And Melissa Lukashenko has described it as dark emu on acid, which is pretty much all I need to know.
So as well as this academic and intellectual work that you do, Tyson, do you have time to read fiction? What do you read?
Oh, not for, well, because, you know, I'm looking after very young babies and working full time and then trying to do all this book stuff. And yeah, this pretty much hasn't been time for a couple of years. So you just read trash then? Yeah, like just something that'll put me to sleep at night. I can read a dozen pages of it. I never even know who the authors are that I'm reading.
I just get like $2 things on my Kindle.
But what sort of things do you like?
booksellers gonna hate my guts for saying that but um i really like viking anything with vikings in it i've got like a i've got a viking fetish you must have been delighted then when we gave you michael christie's 500 page novel greenwood so why don't we move into the trees and we'll start on that one oh i resented having to engage my heart in something
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Chapter 8: What reflections does Abir Mukherjee offer about his writing process?
Douglas firs.
They're really, really tall. They're enormous. But in this future, it's a place where the very wealthy can come and feel the beauty and the majesty of these trees and feel enlightened. Because all the trees across the world, most of them have died. The air's full of dust. There's been a climate apocalypse. But let's hear from the author, Michael Christie himself, explaining what's led to this.
The world has been struck by something that is called, or has been called, the Great Withering. And the cause of it is kind of murky throughout the novel. It's It's a series of blights and infestations and diseases that have caused, you know, the majority of the world's trees to die. And as a result of that, much of the earth has become dead.
uninhabitable or at least very difficult to inhabit other than these certain zones which of course have become resorts for the wealthy to escape to and this is where the story picks up in that location.
Michael Christie from a recent interview on the book show with Claire Nichols. So Tyson, how believable is that great withering that he describes?
Well, firstly, him and how believable. I tell you, what I can't believe is that his wife's letting him go on a book tour without her. So he's got a beautiful voice we just heard. He's really handsome and he makes things with his hands. Yeah. I mean, he's not coming back.
I'm sure he's broken many hearts, but made his way back to Galliano Island every time.
The, the scenario. Yeah. It's really believable. And I like how he focused on, on, on, you know, the fungus and the insects as being, you know, cause there are so many people think about, oh, carbon and it's going to get hotter and then that's going to make some places colder and there's going to be some winds and some fires and stuff.
And people focus on all these big things for Armageddon, but they don't look at the small things.
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